A Free Press and the 5th

This following article is a specific American instance, however, similar dilemmas face reporter all over the world. As a free press is essential to a free society a journalist must have access to information and especially hide information that the electorate requires to give informed consent, and make informed selection in the voting process. The Reporter's Fifth Amendment Paradox Posted by samzenpus on Monday September 09, 2013 @12:39PM from the no-information dept. Bennett Haselton writes: "The ongoing case of New York Times reporter James Risen -- whom the U.S. Department of Justice wants to force to testify against one of his sources for leaking classified CIA information -- brings up a more general question about the Fifth Amendment: Why are criminal defendants allowed to remain silent, but not third-party witnesses like Risen?" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below. In my last article about the Fifth Amendment, I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not. My argument was that you're perfectly entitled to keep information private that is none of anybody's business -- you ought to be able to say, "It's none of your beeswax where I was on the night of the murder" -- however the fact of whether you committed the murder or not, is everybody's business, and I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't." (If you think the state would then try to convict you of lying if they were determined to railroad you, then my answer would be: If the state is going to railroad you anyway, they can convict you of the murder regardless of whether or not you say you're innocent, so that's not an argument in favor of the right to remain silent. I addressed this and several other counter-arguments in the original article.) However, the argument I'm making this time is different. I'm saying that regardless of how you feel about the Fifth Amendment granting criminal defendants the right to remain silent, there's no consistent argument that would support giving defendants the right to remain silent, that should not also apply to third-party witnesses. Here's the basic paradox: Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent! To me, that sounds crazy. (As explained at Findlaw and elsewhere, generally third-party witnesses can be required to testify in a way that defendants cannot. Witnesses can only plead the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if they believe that by answering they could incriminate themselves. If it's generally agreed that a person is a third-party witness who was not guilty of any wrongdoing themselves, they can be forced to answer.) In my first article arguing that defendants should not have the right to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a murder, I wasn't sure of the conclusion, and I invited readers to submit arguments as to why I was wrong (I called the article "Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders", after all, not "Let's Abolish The Fifth Amendment"). I'm still weighing the arguments coming in, and haven't decided what I believe. However, I'm more sure about the point I'm making this time: that there's no principled, consistent reason to give defendants the right to remain silent but not third-party witnesses. This is after talking to multiple lawyers, law students, and law enforcement officers and asking for any argument to the contrary. There are two counter-arguments that I've received multiple times, that deserve a response: "The defendant's rights as a presumed-innocent citizen have to be protected until they're actually convicted." This is absolutely an important principle in a free society, but generally those "rights" refer to rights that free people have as well, and that are preserved even if you've been arrested -- for example, the right to free speech and the right to be presumed innocent, are all rights that the general public enjoys as well. Insofar as the Fifth Amendment says you have the right to refuse to answer questions about the particular incident that got you arrested, that's a right that innocent third-party witnesses don't have. Even in the most progressive societies, generally speaking criminal defendants don't get more rights than the public. Why should they get that special right in this case? Maybe there's an argument why, but you'd have to at least make that argument. So all the talk about protecting the rights of a criminal defendant, is valid, but it misses the point: Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent? "It would be very difficult to prosecute many cases without compelling testimony from third-party witnesses." This is true -- particularly in the cases of reporters like Risen, who refuse to divulge their sources' identities, so all you have is the option of compelling the reporter to testify, when you don't even know the defendant's identity yet. However, that's really an argument that if you had to choose between having the ability to force defendants to testify, and having the ability to force third-party witnesses to testify, you would choose the ability to question third-party witnesses, simply because there are often more of them and sometimes they're available even when the defendant isn't. But that's not an answer to my question, which is: Is there an argument from moral or legal principles as to why the defendant is allowed to remain silent but third-party witnesses are not? Obviously, we don't actually have to choose between requiring defendants to answer and requiring third-party witnesses to answer. If we place more importance on giving courts the power to gather information, we should empower them to question third-party witnesses -- but wouldn't that argument also apply to requiring answers from the defendant? On the other hand, if we place more importance on individual liberty, we could grant the right to remain silent to defendants who are presumed innocent -- but shouldn't we grant that same right to third-party witnesses that we know are innocent? The argument that "it would be too inconvenient to prosecute cases if we couldn't require answers from third-party witnesses", is a bit like saying that if we had to choose between the courts having the power to force Eskimos to testify, and having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, we would choose having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, just because there are more of them. But obviously that's not a principled argument as to why we should be able to require answers from non-Eskimos but not from Eskimos. Of course, many people's sympathy for James Risen might stem not from the fact that he's a third-party witness (to the crime of leaking information), but from the fact that his supporters are sympathetic to the cause of the anonymous leaker, who was exposing what he believed was a corrupt government. (Risen's book is subtitled "The Explosive Book on the Abuse of Power of the Bush Administration", always a way to get fans.) If James Risen knew the identity of someone who had raped and killed a child, but had gone to jail for refusing to name the suspect, probably a lot fewer people would be hailing him as a hero. But that hypothetical just makes the argument from the opposite direction: If we instinctively feel that third-party witnesses to a murder can be forced to answer questions about what they saw, why can't we make a suspect (who is, after all, a special case of a "potential witness") answer questions about what they know as well? Our courts' current stance on the "right to remain silent" -- that it can be claimed by criminal defendants, but not by innocent third-party witnesses -- seems so absurd to me that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think it's an example of groupthink, an assumption that we accept because we're immersed in it, but that few people would ever come up with on their own if they were working from first principles about balancing liberty vs. the rights of the state. Here's what I mean by that: Suppose you had been raised in a world that was identical to our own, except that our rights under the Fifth Amendment were inverted, so that innocent third-party witnesses could refuse to answer questions, but criminal defendants could at least be required to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed the crime. My hunch is that that, instead, would seem natural and sensible. You wouldn't scratch your head and say, "Wait, that seems wrong -- it should be the defendants who should have the right to remain silent, not the innocent witnesses." By contrast, suppose you had been raised in the world that was identical to ours, except that portions of the First Amendment were inverted -- so that we could write any political arguments that we wanted to, but the government demanded prior approval of any fictional stories that we wanted to publish. I would hope that to many people, this would seem like a nagging contradiction, and over time more and more people would point out this inherent hypocrisy and call for restrictions on political thought to be abolished. That's because I think the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is something that can be derived from first principles about individual liberty -- if you want to write something and someone else wants to read it, and neither of you is harming anyone else in the process, it should be nobody else's business, period, full stop. And I just don't see a compelling argument from first principles in support of our current interpretation of the Fifth Amendment -- that we can make third-party witnesses answer questions, but not require the same of a criminal defendant. Regardless, a court has already ruled that James Risen can be made to testify, and barring a successful appeal, he may choose to go to jail rather than reveal his source. The judge writing the ruling against Risen made an interesting slip-up, though, when he wrote: The reporter must appear and give testimony just as every other citizen must. But of course "every other citizen" does not have to give testimony -- if the defendant is ever identified, they won't have to. And that's the inconsistency that I find hard to explain.

This is from the Tyee one of Canada's cutting edge online magazines that covers among other things environmental and social concerns in the West of Canada. Bill Tieleman is on it always. Spot the Political Weasel Words Keep elected officials and the journalists that cover them honest by calling out these slippery lines and clichés. By Bill Tieleman, Yesterday, TheTyee.ca Politician What other political platitudes can you think of? Politician photo via Shutterstock. Related The English Speaker's Guide to Political Journalese How to decipher the noise of political clichés. How to Talk to a Conservative about Climate Change A growing body of social science offers ways to dig the debate out of the 'left-wing ghetto.' The Elements of BC Liberal Style Upon study, the language of the ethnic outreach memo tells us much about the party's inner mind. Read more: Politics, Media, Sign Up for the Tyee Newsletter go Crash Davis: "You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: 'We gotta play it one day at a time.'" Ebby Calvin LaLoosh: "Got to play... it's pretty boring." Crash Davis: "'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down." -- Bull Durham, 1988 Ever heard awful, boring, clichéd words coming from the mouths of politicians and journalists? Of course you have -- practically daily if you watch television news and political panels! Even the revered Peter Mansbridge, veteran anchor of CBC's The National, will regularly throw out one of the laziest questions in the media lexicon: "What do you make of this?" Well, I make that it's a classic cliché that abdicates the interview entirely to the person asked. But it's hardly the only terrible turn of phrase. For example, has any cabinet minister in recent memory "resigned" because of their role in something gone wrong? No. Instead we hear weasel words like this, after the BC Liberal ethnic outreach scandal earlier this year: "When mistakes occur, and they do, we must confront them and take responsibility for them. I've talked to [John Yap], and he has agreed that he is going to step aside from cabinet," Premier Christy Clark told media in March. "Step aside?" Is he square dancing? Will he step back inside shortly? No, Yap resigned, but don't expect the truth to be told. Unless, of course, a politician is desperately trying to sound sincere in interviews. "To tell you the truth" and "to be honest" or "to be frank" are other classics -- because isn't the politician already supposed to be telling the truth? B.C. Deputy Premier Rich Coleman is a master, getting two clichés into one short sentence. "I think, quite frankly, the proponent here didn't do a great job of that, to be honest with you," Coleman said in 2011 while referring to a proposed mine. No one is immune Other annoying pseudo-aphorisms include the catchphrase "but at the end of the day," a signal that after blathering on for ages, a politician or journalist is about to finally, mercifully come to some conclusion that often contradicts what they've previously said. No less an admired columnist as Chantal Hébert is not immune to using a cliché as a journalistic crutch. Writing on federal Conservative challenges in June, Hébert uncorked this one in the Toronto Star. "With ongoing investigations into Senate spending, the upper house will almost certainly continue to give the government more than its share of headaches between now and the 2015 election," Hébert wrote. "But at the end of the day it is the abrupt loss of a chief of staff with a central role in the operations of the government that falls in the potentially more lethal category of political injuries," she concluded, cliché confirmed. Of course, if you are constantly concocting clichés there's only one thing to do -- promise to end the practice "on a go forward basis"! Otherwise, to be honest, at the end of the day, you may have to step aside. [Tyee]

You should read this good in depth report on the first female editor at the New York Times here . http://magazine-directory.com/Newsweek.htm "Good Jill, Bad Jill The Queen of the New York Times by Lloyd Grove.

This is not really a good thing to do I think, however I have just discovered this blogger and find the site and the content very good and thought you might want a look and then regularly check it out. FAIR BLOG Jul 24 2013 Nate Silver Didn't Fit In at the New York Times Because He Believed in the Real World By Jim Naureckas 26 Comments Nate Silver Nate Silver (photo: JD Lasica) In retrospect, Nate Silver's move from the New York Times to ESPN is not too surprising; there's really not too much to say about electoral polling in non-election years, whereas sports (which are what got Silver interested in number-crunching to begin with) generate statistics all year every year. And Silver's new employer is going to let him write about whatever interests him: political forecasting as well as sports, along with economics, say, or the weather (Guardian, 7/22/13). (Hopefully not too much about the weather.) I did find New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's comments (7/22/13) on Silver's departure interesting; Silver "went against the grain for some at the Times," as the headline of her post put it. Sullivan wrote: A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility. Sullivan doesn't detail what kind of complaints these journalists had about Silver's work–which is perhaps an indication that she didn't find it too persuasive–but around that time, shortly before the 2012 election, well-known media figures from a variety of outlets were making a fairly consistent critique. Here was the Washington Post's Dana Milbank (FAIR Blog, 11/5/12): There's Nate Silver, a statistician-blogger at the New York Times, who predicts with scientific precision that President Obama will win 303 electoral votes and beat Romney by 2 percentage points in the popular vote…. The truth is anybody who claims to know what is going to happen on Election Day is making it up and counting on being lucky. And MSNBC's Joe Scarborough (FAIR Blog, 11/2/12): Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes. And the Times' own David Brooks (FAIR Blog, 11/2/12): If you tell me you think you can quantify an event that is about to happen that you don't expect, like the 47 percent comment or a debate performance, I think you think you are a wizard. That's not possible. The thing is, Silver didn't think you could use polls to project the outcome of elections because he had a mystical faith in the power of polling–rather, he had looked at a large number of pre-election polls and found that they had a consistent correlation to the results on Election Day. But this kind of empiricism is weirdly frowned upon in journalism circles; the pundits denouncing Silver as a joke or would-be wizard in 2012 seemingly didn't even bother to go back and check how he had done in 2008. (He had called all but one state, Indiana, correctly.) This is what I like to describe as the difference between objectivity and "objectivity." Objectivity is the belief that there is a real world out there that's more or less knowable; the "objectivity" that journalists practice holds that it's impossible to know what's real, so all you can do is report the claims made by various (powerful) people. The chief benefit of "objectivity" is that it means you will never have to tell any powerful person that they're wrong about anything. If someone comes along and tells you that, no, there are ways to figure out what's actually happening with the world, and simply repeating without question what interested parties claim to be happening is not a very helpful approach, that's going to be, as Sullivan put it, "disruptive." That's what I think she's really getting at when she says, "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that." Filed Under: Election, New York Times, Polling Tagged With: ESPN, Margaret Sullivan, Nate Silver ← Not Much Diversity Among Media's 'Stay-at-Home Dads' Maddow Tells the Story of ALEC and Gun Laws–But Leaves Out One Character → About Jim Naureckas Extra! Magazine Editor Since 1990, Jim Naureckas has been the editor of Extra!, FAIR's bimonthly journal of media criticism. He is the co-author of The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, and co-editor of The FAIR Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the '90s. He is also the co-manager of FAIR's website. He has worked as an investigative reporter for the newspaper In These Times, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal, and was managing editor of the Washington Report on the Hemisphere, a newsletter on Latin America. Jim was born in Libertyville, Illinois, in 1964, and graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree in political science. Since 1997 he has been married to Janine Jackson, FAIR's program director. You can follow Jim on Twitter at @JNaureckas. Profile Sign in with Twitter Sign in with Facebook or Name EmailNot published Website Comment Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. 26 Replies 25 Comments 0 Tweets 1 Facebook 0 Pingbacks Last reply was 1 hour ago Snowshoe 2 days ago Not fitting in is a badge that Silver should wear with pride. Blair Houghton 2 days ago Judith Martin fit in with the Times' culture, and the Bush43 White House used her credulity and the paper's credibility to start an illegal war. So, they should be ashamed of that. No Difference 2 days ago Interesting FAIR blog post. Naureckas quoting a NYT journalist commenting on quotes by other NYT journalists on their opinions on Nate Silver. Any chance we could get a FAIR blog entry on the quality of Sullivan's own work, or perhaps an entry about the work of those "top" NYT journalists who have opinions on Nate Silver? Third- and fourth-hand criticism chains don't compel me very much. Buffalo Reader 2 days ago I was amazed when Margaret Sullivan was hired by the NYT. She led an increasingly complacent Buffalo News. While the paper's fiscal performance was reasonable, its content continued to decline under her tenure. Apparently, not pushing people to get actual facts, but just regurgitating press releases and quotes is what passes for journalism. I guess it's much more convenient, it's much easier to hold whatever opinion you want when you don't bother to check reality. Jim Naureckas 2 days ago No Difference: Did you know that we've written more than 500 blog posts on the New York Times? Not to mention Extra! articles, Action Alerts and CounterSpin broadcasts. rinicook 2 days ago ESPN win! NY Times loss! Political prophet sails on… Eric Werner 2 days ago I am aware of Silver only since the last presidential election. If he is a crackpot and has been a lucky guesser, these are not evident in his methodology (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/). And he has background in sabermetrics, which concerns mathematical/statistical analysis of baseball and is an academically respected subject (usually taught at the advanced undergraduate or graduate level in math departments). So if his critics have not informed themselves of his political forecasting methodology and have not based their concerns about his work on this information (and especially if they have not at least made serious inquiries into his methodology), it is or should be embarrassing to them and their employers. The reference/link above is very recent and so maybe Silver has not published his ways until now? But that he has at least practical experience with sabermetrics is not news and should at least indicate that he might be more than those critics mentioned in Naureckas' article think that he is. I am not suggesting that his political methodology is an extension of sabermetrics. frozenmonkey 2 days ago Name names, Margaret Sullivan. Who are these three "well-respected" "high-profile" Times political journalists criticizing Nate Silver and his work, that readers might reassess them. Donald 2 days ago I would love to see Silver do a statistical analysis on how often the aforementioned pundits that were talking out of their asses were categorically wrong. Perhaps correlate that with their pay. jackalope 1 day ago It is a scientific fact that you can never be so wrong as to endanger your job if your wrongness is in support of power. Nate's situation proves that you can never be so right as to keep your job if what you're right about is in opposition to the power your employer represents. Joe Irvin Conover 1 day ago Interesting … Joe Irvin Conover 1 day ago Always take the national "media" with a large grain of salt. WiZaRd 23 hours I think we all should follow Silver's gift of prophecy and go against the status quo of conformity. The brainless pundits and think tanks of the Far Right can go roast themselves in a lava pit!! Richard Friedman 23 hours Thing is, most people, and especially journalists, do not understand statistics the way Nate (and any professional statistician) does. Yet they use polls, and report on polls without taking into account any inaccuracies or questionable data the way Nate does. I think the NY Times reporters who complained were afraid of losing their mystique and cred, which was mostly unearned anyway. Glad to see that Nate has found a home where he doesn't have to call it "journalism". Marxo Grouch 22 hours What Milbank, Scarborough, Brooks, et al, are also conveniently ignoring is that Silver repeatedly said that his predictions were not intended to be missives directly from the Oracle. He freely admitted that if it was 99% to 1% on any issue, that still meant that the 1% could happen. Which means that, along with having a better grasp of science than those twerps, he also has a better sense of humility. Jeff Thompson 22 hours The New York Times and it's readers are poorer because the culture at the Times didn't fit Nate Silver's objectivity. Not the other way around. Jeff Thompson 22 hours Most of what goes for campaign reporting has to do with the "horse race" aspect. Conveniently, it's a good way to keep readers interested in the race. And for the election that Nate Silver covered, he paid a lot of attention to the electoral college, not the latest polls on undecided likely voters. So while the election may have looked fairly close from the polls of undecided swing voters, the electoral college was pretty well wrapped up in favor of Obama. If there's a culture in the media, it's to get more readers and viewers, not to be accurate. Elliot Linzer 22 hours I will miss Nate Silver. I just finished reading his book, "The Signal and the Noise." His approach was completely scientific and rational. He was able to apply his statistical analysis to almost every topic imaginable, from baseball to poker, chess, daily weather forecasts, the stock market, and everything up to national elections. This is a major loss for the New York Times and its readers. Kevin Cahill 21 hours It's a big loss for the NYT and for its readers. The real problem is that most journalists don't like numbers. Many are bad at math and never learned any science. That's one reason why we burn more coal than uranium warming the planet and causing an epidemic of lung disease. PaulForChange 21 hours Nate Silver was too scientific in his analysis. You can't use science to justify a prediction if it goes against "conventional wisdom". Thank god he was correct. William Barclay 20 hours Definitely the NYT's loss. This is really a bad decision on the part of the powers that be at the NYT. I and my wife will continue to read the NYT (we live in a suburb of Chicago – that should be enough to tell you why we need an actual newspaper instead of the Chicago Tribune or Sun Times). However, we will certainly not expand to a 7 days sub as the NYT keeps asking us. Bruce Rosen 18 hours Queer, isn't it, who's the straight shooter?! Liz 7 hours The reason journalists don't like Silver is because they need to keep the electoral horse race going during an election, or they are out of a job! This "neck-and-neck" coverage, even when unjustified, keeps folks reading those news sources! michael e 2 hours Love to hear what he thinks about the peeter tweeter repeater in New York.If he picks him to win all you Dems should jump out the window.Dont worry we wont be far behind michael e 1 hour ago As far as Obama….I felt if any candidate could make a dent in the 99% black vote he would get….it would be over.I think Silver knew that that would not change no matter what.Like mississippi in the 50s where a black man would never receive any white votes and a white man would get 99% of the votes from whites.Woman under the age of 30 hurt Mitt.They bought that he hates woman …as silly as that sounds.The percentage of fools who believed this president really never changed either.So was it really a surprise?only to people like me who can't understand an unqualified man who has never succeeded at anything being voted in as top dog.I remember when he said he would not let Detroit go bankrupt and a lib friend thumped the table.To me it was just a blatant lie.But like Weener(who may still win) no lie matters to the ever growing left.And I suppose you deserve what you get.Problem is is i dont!If only you would look at the results that some of these legislators have accomplished and vote on that basis……but Im whistling in your grave yard.You simply can;'t or wont.I left the Dems long ago.Republicans last few years.Entrenched washington one like the other.The tea party is an honest American movement to hold legislators to the fire.If they fail they are gone.Right or left.As long as you on the growing left…people lied to ,and on the government dole more and more continue to vote without thinking,you WILL become a forgone conclusion Rebecca Rens 1 hour ago Nate Silver saw correlations and is a smart young fellow. I applaud his work and I don't care if he fit in at the "Times" among the older writers. I look forward to reading what he will be writing at ESPN.

Have to thank Jeff Jarvis at Google+ for this excellent little essay on one of the key controversies in Journalisms now:Jeff Jarvis Shared publicly - 5:46 AM #StainedGlass There are no journalists, there is only the service of journalism. Yes, I know that in condensed form, that may sound like a parodic tweet. But please consider the idea. Thanks to the Snowden-Greenwald NSA story, we are headed into another spate of debate about who is and isn’t a journalist. I’ve long said it’s the wrong question now that anyone can perform an act of journalism: a witness sharing news directly with the world; an expert explaining news without need of gatekeepers; a whistleblower opening up documents to sunlight; anyone informing everyone. It’s the wrong question when we reconsider journalism not as the manufacture of content but instead as a service whose goal is an informed public. Why must we define a journalist? Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan felt compelled to because the newspaper took it upon itself to decide who may wear the cloak, because of debates about Glenn Greenwald as an advocate, and because of questions of law. Her wise and compelling conclusion: “A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn’t shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press – the very tension that America’s founders had in mind with the First Amendment.” Sadly, we don’t often see that definition of journalism played out from TV or the Beltway or especially the overlap of the two. John McQuaid felt the need to ask why Greenwald is driving other journalists crazy. He concludes that asking who is (and isn’t) a journalist is often “a prelude to delegitimizing their work and what they have to say. It quickly devolves to tribalism.” Read: journalists v. bloggers. Sigh. God help us, Dick Durbin felt empowered to propose that legislators should decide who is (and isn’t) a journalist, though in truth they already are when it comes to deciding who is protected by shield laws. But I certainly don’t want government licensing (or unlicensing) journalists. All that discussion in just a few days. All that rehashing a question that has been asked and not answered — or answered all too often and in too many ways — for years. Enough. Journalism is not content. It is not a noun. It need not be a profession or an industry. It is not the province of a guild. It is not a scarcity to be controlled. It no longer happens in newsrooms. It is no longer confined to narrative form. So then what the hell is journalism? It is a service. It is a service whose end, again, is an informed public. For my entrepreneurial journalism students, I give them a broad umbrella of a definition: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves. Thus anything that reliably serves the end of an informed community is journalism. Anyone can help do that. The true journalist should want anyone to join the task. That, in the end, is why I wrote Public Parts: because I celebrate the value that rises from publicness, from the ability of anyone to share what he or she knows with everyone and the ethic that says sharing is a generous act and transparency should be the default for our institutions. Is there a role for people to help in that process? Absolutely. I say that news organizations should first help enable the flow and collection of information, which can now occur without them, by offering platforms for communities to share what they know. Next, I say that someone is often needed to add value to that process by: * asking the questions that are not answered in the flow, * verifying facts, * debunking rumors, * adding context, explanation, and background, * providing functionality that enables sharing, * organizing efforts to collaborate by communities, witnesses, experts. So am I just rebuilding the job description of the journalist? I’m coming to see that perhaps we shouldn’t call it that, for it’s clear that the word “journalist” brings a few centuries’ baggage and a fight for who controls it. These functions — and others — need not come from one kind of person or organization. Well but what about the legal question? Shouldn’t we at least have a definition of journalist so we know who is protected by a shield law? No. For that also defines others who are not protected. Those others are sometimes called whistleblowers and instead of protecting them, our government is at war with them and what they share: information, information about our government, information about us, information that will help us better organize ourselves as a free society. No, we should be discussing this question — like others today — as a matter of principle: protecting not a person with a job description and a desk and a paycheck but instead protecting the ideals of a transparent government and an informed society as necessary conditions of democracy. I’m speaking next week before the third World Journalism Education Congress. I was planning to ask them to challenge our industrial age assumptions about the relationships, forms, and business models of news and to reconsider what and how we teach journalism. I was also planning to suggest that if they call their programs “mass communication,” they should change that, since the title itself is an insult to the public we serve. For as Jay Rosen taught me long ago, sociologist Raymond Williams teaches: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways to see people as masses.” No more. Now I’m wondering whether we should discuss the idea that we’re not journalists and even trying to define a journalist — to fence in the functions and value of the role to a particular job description — is limiting and ultimately defeats the greater purpose of informing society. So what are we? We are servants of an informed society. We always have been. [This post with links: http://buzzmachine.com/2013/06/30/there-are-no-journalists-there-is-only-journalism/ ] Show less 5613

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I know you have all been waiting for this news:Fact: Journalism Is The Sexiest Profession Whether you agree with their “coverage” or not, we can all agree that it’s stinkin’ hot. Photo evidence presented with appalling captions.Check it out for yourself here>http://www.buzzfeed.com/omrirolan/journalism-is-the-sexiest-profession-fact

In the days to come we as reporters will need all the tools that we can get. This is a first feeble attempt:(This is not just the present administration but seems to be an American, Canadian, British trent of government restriction, using the terror threat,the fear threat to restrict and destroy freedom. They won. How Journalists Can Protect Themselves From the U.S. Government By Dan Gillmor | Posted Wednesday, May 15, 2013, at 5:42 PM White House press secretary Jay Carney has recently faced questions related to the Justice Department's subpeona of two months of Associated Press journalists' phone records. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images It is beginning to dawn on America's journalists—a group predisposed, in aggregate, to admire and vote for Barack Obama—that the president and his administration are becoming a clear and present danger to the craft they practice. The Obama Justice Department's collection of vast phone records from the Associated Press, hot news in the past two days, has news people in a tizzy if not a fury. They are right to be angry, if a bit hypocritical given news organizations' widespread indifference to civil liberties breaches that don't affect them so directly. The AP records collection—by most accounts aimed at identifying a leaker inside the government—is an escalation of the administration's unprecedented war on leaks, a war that has made journalists a secondary but no less real target of surveillance. Once they get over being shocked, shocked at the administration's increasingly obvious antipathy toward what they do, American journalists will have to face up to the changed conditions in which they operate. They will have to take many more precautions as they do their work—especially when it comes to the absolutely essential work of finding government whistleblowers. The alternative is being almost entirely neutered, because no whistleblower in his or her right mind today should have much trust in journalists' ability to prevent discovery. The need to beef up journalistic security has been clear for some time. Last year, believable allegations surfaced that Chinese hackers, with likely ties to the Beijing regime, were hacking major news organizations' servers, prompting a flurry of countermeasures that may or may not be working. More recently, hackers apparently tricked their way into getting the AP's main Twitter passwords and then made bogus posts, including one that briefly whacked the financial markets. There were two key lessons for journalists here: a) be certain that they keep their accounts with third-party services under strict control and b) question whether they could afford the blowback from using third-party services that do not themselves employ up-to-date security practices. Now it's time now for U.S. media companies and individual bloggers alike to recognize that they live in an environment in which their own government—not to mention criminal or corporate hackers—may well be using all of the tools at its considerable disposal, legal or not, to spy on them. They will increasingly need to practice their craft here at home as if they were independent journalists or dissidents living under an authoritarian regime. Unless they and their sources are taking extraordinary precautions, journalists should take for granted that most mobile carriers will hand over pretty much anything the government wants, pretty much anytime it asks. This is true of most Internet service providers as well, in part because many the same companies that provide voice-based telecom services. Security experts have been urging journalists—and all of us who value privacy and safety—to think much harder about how we harden our communications against intrusion in general. We can't plan for every contingency, and we have to understand that if a powerful nation-state like this one is willing to break laws and/or work in secret it can get to things others cannot. But we can adapt to various threats. I asked the ACLU's Christopher Soghoian for some advice a year ago, for an article in Columbia Journalism Review, and he offered a several essential suggestions beyond the ones he'd previously made in a New York Times op-ed. For example, he advises against using phones for any conversations with endangered sources unless both sides are using untraceable prepaid devices. He urges folks to use virtual private networks, which encrypt information, but notes that governments (and others) can in many cases still know who's talking to whom. In general, he told me, talk in person if at all possible. Some journalists have taken worthwhile steps. In a noteworthy current example, The New Yorker just launched a "Strongbox" service, which will give sources an anonymous way—if they use it right—to send information to the magazine's journalists. The service leverages the Web-based Tor network, which anonymizes traffic. Every news organization that wants to do its job properly should put systems like this in place. Meanwhile, journalists can find a variety of useful security information from organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has focused mostly on threats abroad. CPJ's "Journalist Security Guide" is a great place to start.* Two days after the AP phone records handover was made public, the White House tried some damage control. It urged Congress to pass a so-called "reporters shield" law, even though no such proposal has never achieved critical mass in Washington. It might help—a little—if it becomes law. But the administration has pressed for a "national security exception" that, given its record, would be liberally applied. The reality is that journalists need to help themselves, in the United States and everywhere else. We need what they do, and their work is increasingly at risk.

Our world is changing so fast and in a blink everything is lost. Have you read 1984? Well, with great speed, we are arriving. Danger! Obama’s War on Journalists His administration’s leak investigations are outrageous and unprecedented. By Emily Bazelon|Posted Tuesday, May 14, 2013, at 6:32 PM Attorney General Eric Holder has overseen more leak investigations under Obama than were pursued under Bush Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images Attorney General Eric Holder has said that he doesn’t want the Obama administration’s leak prosecutions “to be his legacy.” But he has also trumpeted the cases—six and counting—in response to criticism from Senate Republicans. “We have tried more leak cases—brought more leak cases during the course of this administration than any other administration,” Holder said before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year. This shouldn’t be a source of pride, even the fake point-scoring kind. In light of the Justice Department’s outrageously broad grab of the phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press, the administration’s unprecedented criminalizing of leaks has become embarrassing. This is not what Obama’s supporters thought they were getting. Obama the candidate strongly supported civil liberties and protections for whistle-blowers. Obama the president risks making government intrusion into the investigative work of the press a galling part of his legacy. Here’s the official excuse, from the Justice Department’s letter to AP today and from the daily White House press briefing: “The president feels strongly that we need the press to be able to be unfettered in its pursuit of investigative journalism,” press secretary Jay Carney said. “He is also mindful of the need for secret and classified information to remain secret and classified in order to protect our national security interests.” That sounds like a perfectly reasonable balancing, but in practice, it’s not. Between 1917 and 1985, there was one successful federal leak prosecution. The Obama White House, by contrast, has pursued leaks “with a surprising relentlessness,” as Jane Mayer wrote in her masterful New Yorker piece about the prosecution of Thomas Drake. Of Holder and Obama’s six unlucky targets, Drake is the guy who best fits the whistle-blower profile: He gave information to a Baltimore Sun reporter who wrote “a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices” in the National Security Agency. After years of hounding, the case against Drake fell apart, and he wound up pleading guilty to one misdemeanor. No jail time. Advertisement The Drake prosecution started under President George W. Bush. So did the leak prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA officer charged with disclosing information about Iran to James Risen of the New York Times. But Obama’s Justice Department has also launched its own prosecutions, as the AP probe underscores. As Scott Shane and Charlie Savage pointed out last year in the New York Times, it was in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, that DOJ and the director of national intelligence created a taskforce that “streamlined procedures to follow up on leaks.” At the same time, the increasing prevalence of electronic records made investigations easier. The result, as Shane and Savage write, is that while the Justice Department used to be “where leak complaints from the intelligence agencies went to die,” now they are being kept alive. Nor is there a law or a Supreme Court reading of the Constitution to kill them. Timothy Lee lays it out nicely on Wonkblog so I don’t have to: You don’t have a right to protect information that you give to someone else. That’s what the Supreme Court thinks phones calls are—the act of dialing. This could apply to the content of email that lives in the cloud—Gmail! Journalists get the benefit of a rule the Justice Department has made for itself, supposedly to prevent interference with the First Amendment–protected work of reporters. The rule says that the attorney general has to approve the demand for records, and that DOJ lawyers have to take all the other reasonable steps they can before drawing up a subpoena, and then write it as narrowly as possible. But the AP probe, and other examples of surveillance of reporters, show that the rules only mean so much. In Tuesday’s letter to the AP, Deputy Attorney General James Cole said that in this case, DoJ “undertook a comprehensive investigation, including, among other investigative steps, conducting over 550 interviews and reviewing tens of thousands of documents, before seeking the toll records at issue.” But that doesn’t really tell us whether this ordering up of phone records was a valid response to an egregious leak that breached national security, or another Drake affair. The AP thinks the Justice Department wants to know how it reported a story in May 2012 about the CIA’s foiling of a plot by al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate to plant a bomb on a plane. Here’s the story. The AP said at the time that it actually held off publishing for a week, in response to White House and CIA requests, “because the sensitive intelligence operation was still under way.” The government knows things I don’t, of course, but reading the story now, it’s hard to see a threat to national security in the content—it’s just not all that detailed. Whether a leak threatens national security is clearly not the standard Holder and his department are using. And the problem is that the standard is up to them. The 1917 Espionage Act, the basis for most of these cases, was written to go after people who compromised military operations. Back in 1973, the major law review article on that statute concluded that Congress never intended to go after journalists with it, or even their sources. Since then, legal scholars have proposed various ways of narrowing the Espionage Act—University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone wants to limit the law’s reach to cases in which there’s proof that a reporter knows publication will wreck national security without contributing to the public debate. But Congress has done nothing of the sort. Wouldn’t it be nice if the Republicans who are indignant over the AP investigation got serious about reform? Somehow, I doubt it. Instead, with a Democratic White House leading the charge, it’s hard to see who will stop this train. NEXT ITEM IN WEIGEL× Read the Audit of the IRS's Political Scandal Sign up for MySlate to follow all Weigel stories. 922 436

Take a look at this from the New York Times. Change is happening so fast that the cool cutting edge news sources of last week or last year are now sources of ridicule. The major T.V. news outlets in the U.S. have degenerated into a silly joke with their self ejaculated exclusives. Comedy sites,social net works and word of mouth are now the real source of important news. No oversight from what we used to call intelligent educated and experienced editors. Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease By NOAM COHEN Published: April 28, 2013 Much like a friend who can’t let you get to the punch line of a joke without getting there first, the Twitter feed @HuffPoSpoilers takes away the fun of the teasing headlines that The Huffington Post sends out about its articles. On Thursday, for example, when The Huffington Post posted on Twitter, “City council may consider making rifle ownership mandatory,” the HuffPoSpoilers Twitter feed included that original tease and appended the following: “City = Craig, CO (pop. 9,000).” Or on April 4, when it posted, “ ‘Mad Men’ star hints at season six surprises,” HuffPoSpoilers wanted it known that the star was not Jon Hamm or Elisabeth Moss but Ben Feldman, who plays the copywriter Mike Ginsberg. And then there is that deflating feeling produced when a post promising “3 foods that will give you amazingly smooth skin,” is explained simply with “Avocado, honey and sugar.” Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, may not be great for capturing the nuances of complicated social changes but it seems ideally suited to a particular form of snarky journalistic criticism that grows brick by brick, post by post. HuffPoSpoilers uses example after example to expose the habit of sending out overpromising headlines. Similarly, the Twitter feed @NYTOnIt has sent out more than 400 posts, prompted when a trend article from The New York Times seems too obvious or too generic — for example, distilling an article about a study of Internet use among older people as, “GUYS, older folks don’t use the Internet as regularly as younger folks, and The Times is ON IT.” Other targets include articles about the arrival of fall, the use of staplers, and how night stands are becoming more crowded. (In November, The Times enlisted Twitter to have the account more clearly identified as a parody of The Times, not part of The Times, which led to its briefly being taken down.) Another style of journalistic criticism is more of a group effort — like the now nearly four-year-old hashtag #slatepitches. This acts as a clearinghouse for over-the-top “story ideas” that would seemingly fit the counterintuitive spin that Slate magazine favors, along the lines of, say, why Kobe Bryant’s injury would be good for the Lakers in the N.B.A. playoffs. (These days, however, Slate and its contributors appear to be using the hashtag to promote themselves, showing that perhaps the worst thing is to be ignored on Twitter.) A more esoteric example of such Twitter mockery was the flurry of posts with the hashtag #BBCobituaries, which allowed fans of the cult movie “Withnail and I” to object to how one of its stars, Richard Griffiths, was identified by the BBC in an obituary. Mr. Griffiths was identified in the headline only for his work in the Harry Potter movie franchise, rather than for his turn as Uncle Monty in “Withnail.” On Twitter, this emphasis was compared to writing, say, “Marilyn, ex wife of Arthur Miller, dies,” or, “Bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright have passed away.” The message got through to the BBC, and the headline now begins, “Potter and Withnail Actor. ... ” The creator of HuffPoSpoilers, Alex Mizrahi, says his Twitter feed came as a spur-of-the-moment reaction to reading the post “Guess who is the highest-paid celebrity” in August. Rather than guess, Mr. Mizrahi, 30, from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, looked up the answer — Oprah Winfrey, $165 million in 2011 — and added it to the Huffington Post message. He quickly got 10 followers and remembers being excited. “It kills me that there is a 40- or 50-character tweet where they could easily put in more information but choose not to, such as the person involved or the country,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “I understand they want people to read,” he added, but he said it was hard not to feel toyed with when a headline is sent out like this one on Thursday: “1 dead 20 injured as chef mistakes pesticide for sauce.” You think, he said, “Oh my God, that might be New York,” when, as HuffPoSpoilers revealed, this happened in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. On Wednesday, for a reason he can’t really explain, the Twitter feed suddenly got enough attention to cascade, with more than 11,000 followers as of Sunday — Mr. Mizrahi says he knew it was a big deal when he stumbled on HuffPoSpoilers in the feeds of people he follows. (He does not identify himself as the creator of the Twitter handle, but it was not hard to discover who it was.) Mr. Mizrahi works freelance trying to link social media to entertainment — and, in that way, his experience creating an online phenomenon could actually fit on his résumé. But he acts, he says, “out of love,” simply to register his dislike of a practice that is not limited to The Huffington Post. “The Huffington Post wouldn’t have three million followers if people didn’t like the content and like the articles and like what they are producing,” he said, “but people like me get annoyed by their cryptic tweets that don’t tell you anything, or just obvious click bait.” Thus far, Huffington Post has not changed its tactics on Twitter, but it did give some publicity to those who would mock it. The very brief article about HuffPoSpoilers on Thursday says, “We don’t know who’s behind this account but it made us laugh, so we’re sharing it with you too.” Of course, Huffington Post also promoted that article on Twitter: “@HuffPoSpoilers ruins every tease-filled tweet from @HuffingtonPost for you.” That message left Mr. Mizrahi at a bit of a loss. All he could append was, “can’t ruin this one.” A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Turning the Tables on the News Media Tease.

Pew-"State of the Media"

This can only lead to dictatorship:Via Slashdot-"Jack Mirkinson reports that Pew Research Center's annual "State of the Media" study found that, since 2007, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have all cut back sharply on the amount of actual reporting found on their airwaves. Cheaper, more provocative debate or interview segments have largely filled the void. Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting. Critics of that figure would likely contend that the network's straight news reporting tilts conservative, but it is true that Fox News has more shows that feature reporting packages than MSNBC does. According to Pew MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself in prime time as a liberal counterweight to the Fox News Channel's conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. The Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary."

A New Journalism: Sources are the life blood of excellence in Journalism. Where are they? How do you find them? Here is one new example from the Guardian: How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room Leicester-based blogger's monitoring of weapons used in conflict has been taken up by media and human rights groups Matthew Weaver guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 March 2013 15.23 GMT Jump to comments (35) Eliot Higgins, aka Brown Moses, encounters a new video from Syria from matthew weaver on Vimeo. Eliot Higgins has no need for a flak jacket, nor does he carry himself with the bravado of a war reporter. As an unemployed finance and admin worker his expertise lies in compiling spreadsheets, not dodging bullets. He has never been near a war zone. But all that hasn't stopped him from breaking some of the most important stories on the Syrian conflict in the last year. His work on analysing Syrian weapons, which began as a hobby, is now frequently cited by human rights groups and has led to questions in parliament. Higgins' latest discovery of a new batch of Croatian weapons in the hands of Syrian rebels appears to have blown the lid on a covert international operation to arm the opposition. And he's done it all, largely unpaid, from a laptop more than 3,000 miles away from Damascus, in his front room in a Leicester suburb. Behind the tulip-patterned lace curtains, among the discarded toys belonging to his toddler daughter, a new video has just popped into his inbox. It appears to shows Croatian weapons, believed to have been smuggled to Syria with the collusion of the west, in the hands of jihadi fighters, who are increasingly leading the fight against Bashar al-Assad's government. Higgins' weapons-spotting eye is immediately drawn to two tubes next to a large gun. The detail suggests that any US attempts to vet which groups get such arms are failing. Pointing at the screen, Higgins says: "Those are rocket pods for the M79 Osa Croatian rocket launcher. And what's even more interesting is this YouTube channel belongs to Ansar al-Islam, which is a jihadi organisation. That group shouldn't be getting those weapons." Higgins, 34, has no training in weapons, human rights research or journalism – he dropped out of a media studies course at university. But his work is being taken up by everyone from Amnesty International to the New York Times. He is amused to be referred to as a weapons expert. "Journalists assume I've worked in the arms trade," he says, "But before the Arab spring I knew no more about weapons that the average Xbox owner. I had no knowledge beyond what I'd learned from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rambo." Higgins initially operated on chatrooms and comment threads under the pseudonym Brown Moses. His online avatar – taken from one of Francis Bacon's paintings of a screaming pope – was often the first to appear in the comments section on the Guardian's daily Middle East live blog. Each day he would do verbal battle below the line with online trolls, conspiracy theorists and fellow Arab spring obsessives. The name Brown Moses, taken from a Frank Zappa song, has led to confusion about his identity. "It makes some people think I'm black and Jewish – I've even been racially abused. I've been accused of all sorts of things online: CIA, MI5, MI6, Mossad, Bilderberg group." Partly to avoid such suspicions, he no longer conceals his identity and has emerged into the open, where he is being hailed as something of a pioneer. The conflict in Syria has been extremely difficult and dangerous for conventional media organisations to cover. But the slew of YouTube footage from citizen journalists has opened up a new way of monitoring what's happening for those such as Higgins who are dedicated and meticulous enough to sift through it. "Brown Moses is among the best out there when it comes to weapons monitoring in Syria," says Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, who worked with Higgins to document the use of cluster bombs in Syria. He represents an important development in arms monitoring, which used to be the domain of a few secretive specialists with access to the required and often classified reference materials. "He'd be the first to admit that he is obsessive compulsive in his attention to details. He gets his facts right, and has become an indispensable resource." Eliot Higgins, blogger on syrian weapons Eliot Higgins at home. The New York Times veteran war reporter CJ Chivers, author of The Gun: the story of the AK47, says fellow journalists should be more honest about the debt they owe to Higgins' Brown Moses blog. "Many people, whether they admit or not, have been relying on that blog's daily labour to cull the uncountable videos that circulate from the conflict," he says. Chivers acknowledged that Higgins was on to the Croatian arms story weeks before the New York Times. He and Higgins then worked together to develop the story, with Chivers rooting out extra details about how the weapons were financed. In a blogpost about the genesis of the report, Chivers wrote: "Thank you, Eliot, for your patience, and your fine eye, and for creating an opportunity for merging new and old forms of reporting into a fresh look at recent events." Higgins goes through about 450 YouTube channels from Syria every evening. The list includes uploaded footage from activists, rebel brigades and Islamist groups, as well as from Assad supporters and state TV footage. "If EastEnders isn't on I get straight on the laptop. On a good night when nothing much has been posted, it will take me an hour and a half, but I've been looking more closely recently." Recent activist footage claimed to show the remains of a Chinese-made cluster bomb at the scene of a bombing. Drawing on his online network of fellow weapons-spotters and translators, Higgins established that it was in fact a bicycle pump. "If I started putting out rubbish I'd know about it pretty quickly, because of the audience that follows me," he says. "The success of the blog feeds the compulsion," Higgins says. "If I had the chance I do it for 16 hours a day. When I'm sat on a bus I'll be checking Twitter looking for footage of planes being shot down. When cluster bombs were first used I couldn't sleep. It was about midnight and I saw this video of these bomblets spilt on the floor with their casings. I had to research it. You have to be first and you have to be right." Since then, Higgins has put together a database of 491 videos of cluster bombs being used across Syria, together with map references and details of the type of weapons used. He has had more time to do this since being made redundant from his day job last October. The organisation he was working for lost a government contract to house asylum seekers to the security firm G4S. "None of my jobs have been relevant to the work I'm doing now," he says. "The closest I got to Syrians was telling asylum seekers where they were being picked up. The advantage I've got is time and the fact I've been going through them for a year or so." Higgins' wife's job behind the counter at the local post office helps pay the bills. "My wife sees me doing all this work and thinks I should be getting paid for it. But I'm doing it because I see stuff that isn't being reported in the mainstream media and want to record it." He says his approach is no substitute for traditional war reporting but it can help tell the story. "This can't replace journalists on the ground," he says. "They take amazing risks and do an incredible job. But this work can direct them. "I don't think many people would have picked up on Croatian weapons in Deraa because there weren't journalists in that area. It may never have been noticed. It was only because I was on the lookout for interesting looking rocket launchers." What we have learned about Syrian weapons via Brown Moses • Cluster bombs were first spotted by Higgins in summer of 2012 and used extensively used from October. The Syrian government denies they exist in Syria, but Higgins has developed a database of almost 500 videos documenting the use of cluster bombs, which are banned in most countries. • Reports of DIY barrel bombs being thrown out of helicopters were initially dismissed as "baloney" by a Russian military expert. Extensive and clear footage unearthed by Higgins suggests otherwise. • The proliferation of shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles known as Manpads. Most recently Higgins has documented Chinese-made FN6 Manpads in the hands of rebels fighting around Aleppo. • A cache of weapons from the former Yugoslavia was first noticed by Higgins at the start of this year in the hands of rebel groups fighting in the southern province of Deraa. The weapons were financed by Saudi Arabia with the knowledge of the US, subsequent reports alleged.

The Evil That Is Mythic Belief

Journalists must carefully check what they pass along as truths. Dr. pass along myths the same as anyone else:Reality Check: 5 Risks of a Raw Vegan Diet Misconceptions of the philosophy of the raw vegan diet include the claim that raw foods are detoxifying and contain more "life energy" By Christopher Wanjek and LiveScience 2 inShare Exotic, organic vegetables on display at a Hertfordshire farmer's market in the U.K. Image: Wellcome Images On the road to good health, there are many forks. Some paths, such as vegetarianism or the Mediterranean diet, have considerable science supporting them. Others, such as the vegan or plant-based diet, which shuns all animal products including eggs and dairy, are winning converts. And then there's a new offshoot, the raw vegan diet, which deems cooking to be unnatural and unhealthy. An increasing number of celebrities — most recently, tennis sensation Venus Williams — swear by this diet as the best way to prevent and reverse diseases and to stay young and vital. Testimonials from ordinary folks are endless, boasting advantages along the lines of having more energy, better skin, improved relationships with woodland creatures and so on. But on your road to good health, the raw vegan diet would likely be a U-turn. If you are already vegan or vegetarian, you have nothing to gain and much to lose by going totally or even mostly raw. Even doctors who prescribe and live by a vegan diet caution their patients against attempting a raw diet. The reason? You would greatly reduce the types of foods you can eat. And you would do so in vain, because most of the raw vegan principles are based on misconceptions about human nutrition, and work counter to good health. [7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe] This article addresses five such principles that are either half true or completely false. What is raw veganism? First, a primer: Raw veganism is a plant-based diet that involves no cooking. No food is heated above 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius). Foods are eaten fresh, dehydrated with low heat or fermented. A core tenet of the diet is that heating food above 104 degrees not only diminishes its nutrients, but also makes the food toxic and less digestible. In raw vegan parlance, cooking is killing. Many raw vegans speak of "live" foods versus "dead" foods, and they aren't talking about sushi, so fresh it still wiggles. Live or uncooked foods are said to be filled with vital life energy. In this way, raw veganism is an extension of the vegan appreciation for animal welfare, with the added spirituality of a life force, called chi or prana. Dead or cooked foods are said to be depleted of their life energy, as well as most of their nutrients. Juicing and blending "green smoothies" often are key elements of this diet. Now for the misconceptions: Misconception #1: Cooking destroys nutrients Sure, raw foods can be nutritious. But cooking breaks apart fibers and cellular walls to release nutrients that otherwise would be unavailable from the same raw food. Cooking tomatoes, for example, increases by five-fold the bioavailability of the antioxidant lycopene. Similarly, cooking carrots makes the beta-carotene they contain more available for the body to absorb. Soups are full of nutrients that would not be available in a pot of raw carrots, onions, parsnips and potatoes. [Science You Can Eat: 10 Interesting Facts About Food] Cooking can also reduce certain chemicals in a vegetable that inhibit the absorption of minerals, including important minerals like zinc, iron, calcium and magnesium. Cooking spinach makes more iron and calcium available from its leaves, for example. Admittedly, some nutrients are lost in cooking, such as vitamin C and certain B vitamins. But "plants are so excess in nutrients that even this breakdown is insignificant in practical terms," said John McDougall, creator of the McDougall Program, a vegan-friendly, starch-based diet.

What is wrong with this story? This is a big danger in Journalism especially were the writer of the story and the writer of the headline are different people. This happens when the writer is the same person as well.January 8, 2013 Daily Newsletter NEWS CES 2103: Toyota Unveils an Autonomous Car, But Says It’ll Keep Drivers in Control The carmaker discusses research that could make cars autonomous and eliminate traffic fatalities.

Someone has to stand up and be counted:(Thanks to the CBC for this) Arts & Entertainment News Clark Kent rants about journalism Superman alter-ego quits Daily Planet Both comic book geeks and journalists were buzzing about the latest issue of Superman today as his mild-mannered alter ego Clark Kent quits his job as a reporter for the Daily Planet. Clark Kent quits The Daily Planet and bemoans the state of journalism in his newsroom resignation speech. bit.ly/TNqjTI Romenesko a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite In Superman #13, Kent gets chewed out by his boss Perry White for not having filed a story in a week. Kent gets philosophical about journalism, saying, "Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who believes news should be about-- I don't know, news?" "Times are changing and print is a dying medium," says White. OMG Clark Kent, thank you. #THANKYOU pic.twitter.com/ZRpXCKzk NMMan a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite But the journalism business being what it is, some in the media said that Kent would more likely be fired than quit. Wouldn't it be more realistic for Clark Kent to be laid off from the Daily Planet, rather than quit? jimromenesko.com/2012/10/22... Mike Madden a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite In the new issue of Superman, Clark Kent quits the Daily Planet. In reality, he'd be laid off or looking for a PR gig: pic.twitter.com/Syr1cl3f RobTornoe a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite As Clark Kent quits his job, a New Yorker cartoon I have pinned to my desk: pic.twitter.com/dY6nNZXw James Bradshaw a day ago ReplyRetweetFavorite

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/why_the_western_media_hates_julian_assange_20120823/?utm_source=twitterfeed Check this out: Why the Western Media Hates Julian Assange Posted on Aug 23, 2012 OperationPaperStorm (CC BY 2.0) Professional jealousy; dogmatic institutionalism; craven loyalty to power. Glenn Greenwald fires a devastating salvo at the British and American press for their dogged campaign of “disgusting slander” against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “[L]et us pause to reflect on a truly amazing and revealing fact, one that calls for formal study in several academic fields of discipline,” Greenwald writes. “Is it not remarkable that one of the very few individuals over the past decade to risk his welfare, liberty and even life to meaningfully challenge the secrecy regime on which the American national security state (and those of its obedient allies) depends just so happens to have become—long before he sought asylum from Ecuador—the most intensely and personally despised figure among the American and British media class and the British ‘liberal’ intelligentsia?” —Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly. Follow him on Twitter: @areedkelly. Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian: There are several obvious reasons why Assange provokes such unhinged media contempt. The most obvious among them is competition: the resentment generated by watching someone outside their profession generate more critical scoops in a year than all other media outlets combined (see this brilliant 2008 post, in the context of the Clintons, about how professional and ego-based competition produces personal hatred like nothing else can). Other causes are more subtle though substantive. Many journalists (and liberals) like to wear the costume of outsider-insurgent, but are, at their core, devoted institutionalists, faithful believers in the goodness of their society’s power centers, and thus resent those (like Assange) who actually and deliberately place themselves outside of it. By putting his own liberty and security at risk to oppose the world’s most powerful factions, Assange has clearly demonstrated what happens to real adversarial dissidents and insurgents – they’re persecuted, demonized, and threatened, not befriended by and invited to parties within the halls of imperial power – and he thus causes many journalists to stand revealed as posers, servants to power, and courtiers. Then there’s the ideological cause. As one long-time British journalist told me this week when discussing the vitriol of the British press toward Assange: “Nothing delights British former lefties more than an opportunity to defend power while pretending it is a brave stance in defence of a left liberal principle.” That’s the warped mindset that led to so many of these self-styled liberal journalists to support the attack on Iraq and other acts of Western aggression in the name of liberal values. And it’s why nothing triggers their rage like fundamental critiques of, and especially meaningful opposition to, the institutions of power to which they are unfailingly loyal.

From the Columbia School of Journalism http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/election_2012_coverage_another.php on "the persisting gender gap in opinion media. Women’s voices were especially lacking in legacy media, and on ‘hard news’ topics like the economy and politics—both of which are just as much women’s issues as they are men’s, mind you—according to byline data collected by The OpEd Project." Check it out at there web site.

The future of the newspaper is very much part of the news over the last few years. Local papers actually thrive and here in Japan the large national newspapers are still viable business operations. Questions of what is news and what is missed continue. Should news be free is the question with the following article from quoted from Slashdot with many of the comments that followed which are very interesting if you are at all interested in this question (note that the Slashdot community is made up of nerds and geeks so you are getting the best insights available): Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 25, @05:29PM from the there-ain't-no-such-thing-as-a-free-article dept. Koreantoast writes "Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway recently purchased 63 newspapers and plans to purchase more over the next few years, noted during an interview that the current free content model is unsustainable and will likely continue pushing toward more electronic subscription models. This coincides with moves by other newspaper companies like Gannett and the New York Times, which are also erecting paywall systems. Buffett notes that newspapers focusing on local content will have a unique product, which would succeed even if they lose subscribers, because their services are irreplaceable. Is this the beginning of the end of 'free content' for local news?" 100 of 195 comments loaded twitterfacebook news yaright greed ← You may like to read: → Curt Schilling Fires Entire Staff At 38 Studios In Nothing We Trust TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump $60 Light Bulb Debuts On Earth Day Windows 8 Won't Play DVDs Unless You Pay For the Media Center Pack Anti-Education Attack Poisons 150 Afghan Schoolgirls Submission: The coming end of "free content" news? Texter Not Responsible For Textee's Car Accident, Rules Judge PostLoad All Comments 21 Full79 Abbreviated0 Hidden /Sea Search 195 CommentsLog In/Create an AccountComments Filter: All Insightful Informative Interesting Funny The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. › The End of Free? (Score:4, Insightful) by Mikkeles (698461) on Friday May 25, @05:31PM (#40114103) Maybe, but if it's good local news (well researched and useful to me), I'm willing to pay reasonably for it. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re:The End of Free? (Score:5, Insightful) by dintech (998802) on Friday May 25, @05:38PM (#40114201) One of the oldest local newspapers in London, the Evening Standard [wikipedia.org] used to be 50 pence and is now free. It's online content isn't behind a paywall either. They still seem to be doing ok so it can work out in some cases. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Even better; but I wonder how long advertising can sustain such an effort. I've also found that many of the free papers are totally irrelevant wrt newsworthiness due to being just a collection of syndicated items. Re:The End of Free? (Score:5, Informative) by sortius_nod (1080919) on Friday May 25, @06:12PM (#40114647) Homepage As someone who has worked for a newspaper/online news org, I've seen the profit/loss statements, & subscriptions/sales don't even rate on it. Newspapers make the lion's share of their revenue purely from advertising contracts. Some may see this as an outdated business model due to the prices charged for advertising space (upwards of AU$100k per full page), but it's is how they've made money in the past. The main hurdle with going online is that no one is going to pay you the same rates for banner ads. Paywalling has its own problems too: Murdoch paywalls are easily bypassed, others drive consumers away due to no free content. I really don't see any answer other than accepting the fact there's not massive amounts of money in news media these days. Personally, I tend to read independent online publications such as New Matilda, Conversation AU, & Independent Australia, (yes, I'm an Aussie) which rely on donations & small amounts of advertising revenue. The level of journalism is actually higher than that of news sites subsidised by their print or TV media. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Thank you. I was not aware of any of these.I found New Matilda [newmatilda.com] and Independent Australia [independentaustralia.net] but would like to confirm I have the correct site for Conversation AU [theconversation.edu.au]. Re: Yes indeed, that last one is correct. Re: What is really going on here is ease of acceptability. No huge building, with printing presses, transport and delivery system and sales sites required. You can squeeze internet news to just the journalist and if you're an ass hat like Ariana Huffington you can suck them into doing for free and then sell out from underneath them (oh so slimy). So the problem with free internet news, is not that the model is bad, it's that easy access has driven up competition. Now add in global competition to that mix and Re: Having worked for " Americas Only Rock and Roll Magazine" and others till I settled into a real life, I can say I've certainly seen the tumultuous life that publications go through. But I welcome this internet age and the change it brings. Honestly, Thomas Jefferson was right about "newspapers" , their net value to man and their caveats.( don't bother me, google it) I see many evolutions happening to various media as do you. Television, movies, music and print. The outcome, for those of you remaining in den Re: When the Evening Standard was sold for a price, it was a failing paper and was loss-making. Now it is a free-sheet (and under new ownership) it is popular and profitable.I don't read the Standard as I don't live in London, but it's owned by the same proprietor as The Independent- one of the few genuinely quality daily nationals. Re: I worry that we are heading to a real-time wikipedia of truthiness that is driven by rumour and here-say.News outlets on occasion provided us with a reasoned and measured interpretation of events, albeit interspersed with whatever political dogma was pertinent to the writer, editor and paymasters respectively.Now the the first "frosty piss" on twitter is rebroadcast, amplified and contorted until it's a hideous warping of one singular and imperfect being's interpretation of events. I thInk we should all lam Re: The Evening Standard is fine if your idea of news is is mostly celebrities and sports. If people didn't grab it to read on the train going home after work, they'd likely go under. Re: But the quality has dropped. It's news for hire now. Re:The End of Free? (Score:4, Interesting) by pepty (1976012) on Friday May 25, @06:12PM (#40114659) And if it's bad local news, someone else is willing to pay for you to see it. The San Diego Union Tribune was recently bought by a real estate developer. Mostly because it was so cheap he could turn a profit just by selling the land the paper owned, but he also said pretty bluntly that he did it so he could use the paper as a megaphone to promote his own local real estate development plans and political views. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: You don't seem to understand the role technology plays in transforming how societies work. The killer is the loss of advertising revenue (Score:5, Informative) by knorthern knight (513660) on Friday May 25, @11:27PM (#40117591) > For centuries we have been paying for news by buying > newspapers - paying for news sites is pretty much the same thing Fact... your subscription comes *NOWHERE NEAR* the full cost of a newspaper (buying paper, paying reporters, editors, printers, delivery trucks, janitors, secretaries, etc, etc). The vast majority of newspaper revenue has been from advertising. Newspaper ad revenue in the USA has fallen from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011 http://newsosaur.blogspot.ca/2012/03/newspaper-sales-slid-to-1984-level-in.html [blogspot.ca] The last time it was that low was in 1984. That's *WITHOUT ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION*. Just like Facebook, subscribers were never the real customers. Advertisers were the real customers, and subscribers' eyeballs were the product that newspapers sold to advertisers. In "the good ole days" newspapers had a virtual monopoly on advertising. They were able to charge extortionate rates for advertising. This allowed them pay for correpondents in Baghdad, London, Moscow, Washington, and at state/provincial legislatures, and at city halls, and still turn a big fat profit. Department stores, auto dealers, and home sellers were effectively paying an "advertising tax" to sell their products. Where there's a tax, someone will look for tax loopholes ("advertising tax avoidance"). * "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See... http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine [manta.com] It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates. It ate newspapers' breakfast, lunch, and supper as far as used-car ads were concerned. * Right now, where I live, there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc * Back in the mid-1980's, "The Real Estate Weekly" came out in Toronto. It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real estate firms came out ahead. * Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). This cost less than having the newspapers print them. Next step was, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either... - have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units) - or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed. To summarize newspapers main problem... their business model requires selling advertising at rates way in excess of cost, and using that margin to pay journalists. That works only as long as you have a monopoly/cartel situation. Once newspapers lost Read the rest of this comment... Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: A fun fact extension is that the cover price for printed newspapers generally doesn't even cover the price of physically printing the ink on the paper and shipping it to the newsagent. The advertising pays not only for the journalists and offices and whatnot, but even covers a part of the cost of the printed medium.When the news content is served over the internet, which has a vastly lower cost to run than the cost of the physical newspapers, and considering that internet advertising is if anything more use Re: Its not so much double dipping as in the ads aren't worth much online and advertisers know that very quickly. The TV and print media have been very good at convincing their customers that ads worked and they worked well. Why do you think that being an advertising executives was shown in such a good light in 1960s tv shows? Re: Or just give it away like USAToday; about 2/3 of their circulation is handed out to hotels and schools. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "They charge nothing for their paper, and it's worth it". Problem: many "for profit" papers are unprofitable Many "for profit" newspapers are are the wrong kind of "non profit", and quite a few have gone under. The vast majority of newspaper revenues are from advertising. The sum total of USA newspaper advertising revenue has dropped from $49.4 billion in 2005 to $23.9 billion in 2011.Subscriptions are peanuts in comparison. Subscriptions might pay enough to have the paper delivered. They come nowhere near enough to pay for newsprint, printing machines and printing staff, secretaries, janitors, phone bills, office hardly (Score:4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25, @05:31PM (#40114115) Why would anyone pay to be lied to Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: ...when so many people are happy to do it for free. Re: clearly your hookers are less sarcastic than mine Re: How else are you going to find out what's in your kitchen that could be killing you?! Re: Because the truth is unpleasant. As cliche as the saying goes, it is true: People can't handle the truth. Re: It's true. Sometimes I think they're going to come after me with pitchforks. Re: Most of the lying isn't in the articles, it's in the ads. Particularly lying by omission, which is the sine qua non of advertising. He doesn't get it (Score:5, Insightful) by Vintermann (400722) on Friday May 25, @05:36PM (#40114173) Homepage I'd wager a lot of the price of media companies now reflects their control, not their profitability. Sure, making money by selling news is great, but the power to set society's agenda, and frame events for the history books, is infinitely more valuable. If you think of that as the raison d' etre of the big media companies, it becomes obvious why they offer "news" free on the internet. Also, that Buffet will pay a premium for these shares... Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: In my country there are a lot of newspapers, like everywhere else. Almost all of them lose money. I can give you two examples on both extremes: There's a piece of toilet paper called "Correio da Manhã" (Morning Mail) which is a huge commercial success. 1 quarter is ass-kissing the government, the other is filled with sensationalist news about murders and robberies, the other is about sports, and the last is celebrity gossip + tits n'ass. It appeals to the uneducated masses and exploits the lowest f Re: or, you know, run an ad network masquerading as a forum masquerading as a blog Re: Buffett has made a fair chunk of change by investing in some fairly shady outfits. The perpetual motion ripoff machine known as Kirby Vacuums is a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, for one example. You doen't get it Warren Buffet is in court over not paying his taxes. HE was on tv several times talking about taxing 'rich' people more, taxes he doesn't pay. Also, taxes that won't impact the way he makes money . Taxes are fun, you should study them and their application so you don't sound like a useful idiot. Buffet should be smarter than this... (Score:4, Insightful) by mspohr (589790) on Friday May 25, @05:38PM (#40114195) Guy buys a lot of newspapers and now is discovering that he can't make money with them? He doesn't think they have a viable business model? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re:Buffet should be smarter than this... (Score:5, Interesting) by Mashiki (184564) on Friday May 25, @05:51PM (#40114371) Homepage Well he hasn't made money for a bit to be honest, and has made some seriously bad blue-chip gambles that fell flat on their face too. Which has a lot of people wondering if he's simply hit the senile point and he's out of touch with the markets. I remember reading hmm was it zerohedge or somewhere else, that he hasn't made money in over 3 years on any investments he's done. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: If your time-horizon is three years, you're not even playing the same game as Mr. Buffet. And you're far less likely to make money at whatever it is you are doing... Re: Right. I play in currencies, which unlike stocks is by far riskier and has a much nastier bite, requiring you to understand not only companies, but government policy and how it will effect your trading. But make less money? No, hardly that. The riskier the game, the higher the payoff. And it doesn't get riskier than the currency market. Re: Except its not. Higher risk does not automatically guarantee higher payoff. Re: Of course it doesn't. Though it usually does, and one doesn't get anywhere without taking risks. The reality is traditional media as it stands isn't a risk, or even a worthwhile risk. It's a poor risk with no ROI, the deadtree form of media is just that dead. The electronic form of media is and quickly been subverted by free media, and a round of large aggregate services.The smaller papers which have gone to paywalls have quickly killed any viewership unless they have very unique content which is being Re: Past 3 years you say? Hmm... I seem to remember something about a recession... maybe starting in 2008.Nah.. that can't be right.. Buffett probably is just senile. Re: Yeah I mean it's not like other people haven't made money or anything. Making money when the economy is on the downturn is the easy part. It's keeping it when it's booming that's the hard part. Re: If I were modding, I'd go +1 interesting, but I'm not (I don't seem to get mod points these days; dunno why; whatever).Why is it that so many people equate intelligence with smart? The cliche joke is Mensa. They may be intelligent, but the only smart (purported) Mensa sort I've known was Shepherd from Stargate:Atlantis (he took the tests, that's all). All my life, I've been hearing about "book smart" vs. "street smart." Mensa are not generally known for street smarts. Then there's the shit they teach i Re: well, he's buying papers which he thinks has a local monopoly. that's pretty much his "safe bet" in this. charging for local gov. bulletins and soccer practice timetables. if you give those for free on your net edition, why would the locals bother subscribing?-) Re: No, he thinks that they are under-valued and have the potential of making money in the future . . . if the free news model disappears, and the pay-walled model becomes the norm and profitable. If that actually will come to be in the future . . . is quite debatable. So anyway, he bought them because he thinks he can give them a better business model. Re: No. It's more like "Guy thinks he can forsee a sea-change in the way an industry works, buys up some of the industry, and then makes announcements about how the industry will change, possible encouraging the very change he's speculating on by virtue of his reputation." Re: If you analysis model is, "Warren Buffett should be smarter than this," you should think harder about it. I'm not saying he never makes a mistake, but he's a pretty smart investor.For example, an alternative model is, "Warren Buffett sees a solution to the problems of print media. First, he invests in underpriced, struggling print media organizations. Then, he comes out saying that their old model is bad business. Finally, he introduces a new, more profitable model."Warren Buffett's no idiot. Everyone clear Re: Or he thinks that their value in shaping opinion will increase his profit in other areas enough to make up for his losses in owning them, but he needs to make people think that he is expecting to make a profit from the news business (rather than planning to use the news business to make a profit elsewhere). Online or offline? (Score:5, Insightful) by war4peace (1628283) on Friday May 25, @05:43PM (#40114265) I'd venture to differentiate between online news and offline news. A paper magazine, sure, I'd pay for it more than the paper it's written on if I consider it a collectible. But online... I'm more interested in the hard data itself rather than the way it's written, and with all the portals publishing user-generated content (and some of those are REALLY good), I am not afraid of lacking any news sources any time soon. So what if I won't get informed about Justin Bieber's latest deeds right now? Some blog would republish the news in some way or another, if it's important enough, and Google's your friend. And of course, there's always Slashdot. As a matter of fact, I'm regularly visiting just Slashdot, Wikipedia, Wimp, Failblog and a couple local news sites (which are both awesome). Everything else can go to hell, as far as I'm concerned, and if any of the above go to hell themselves, well, I'll look for the next best thing. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate At least there's the BBC... (Score:3, Interesting) by SeanDS (1039000) on Friday May 25, @05:44PM (#40114279) ...which is funded by the British licence fee. As long as the current BBC-hating government don't cripple the corporation beyond repair. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Grassroots reform (Score:3, Insightful) by Tommy Bologna (2431404) on Friday May 25, @05:44PM (#40114281) Local news coverage is abysmal in most American towns. Subscription support would at least allow them to hire a handful of professional reporters, and might even breathe life back into the field of journalism. God knows we need better journalists at all levels. Rebooting the minor leagues might eventually benefit us by trickling up to the national level too -- but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I would be ecstatic if Philadelphia had some quality reporting instead of the wasteland of fluffy features and regurgitated national news service stories. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate So why is news different? (Score:3) by MindlessAutomata (1282944) on Friday May 25, @05:48PM (#40114331) "Free" is increasingly becoming the new thing; free-to-play models are starting to rise and succeed in video games, free steaming tv shows and other video are becoming increasingly popular, and naturally there are companies that operate in a way someone-like Google does. How many android/iPhone apps are free? And then we see various music services cropping up that allow free streaming music.. Why would the news be different from this trend? It's harder and harder to prevent the dissemination and replication of information (pirating etc) and companies are finding creative new ways to still make money even in light of that. And the news is subject to the same problem; a paywall is not a big deal if one person has a subscription and can pass the text of the article around elsewhere. All it takes is for one competitor to shit in the pot and go free or next-to-free to ruin the market for everyone else; I don't see pay-for news being a viable or stable strategy in the long-term. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: How are reporters going to be paid? Do you think they will work for free? Re: There are already applications that write better news articles than the average Times or Guardian piece. Re: Newspapers are a modern equivalent of buggy whips. Their business is based around limited availability of information - and on explaining the information to a minimally educated person. Today you can get your news directly from news agencies of all countries in the world. Cost of each short piece of news is nearly zero. Some news are produced on taxpayer's dime (NASA and other government entities; BBC.) Other news sources are financed by governments to disseminate the information about the country. Not e And yet he posits this notion on a free site... (Score:5, Insightful) by mark-t (151149) <`markt' `at' `lynx.bc.ca'> on Friday May 25, @05:49PM (#40114343) Journal Anyone else see the irony here? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate People Care Less About Local News Than They Say (Score:3) by reallocate (142797) on Friday May 25, @05:50PM (#40114353) Buffett's right, of course. No business can survive without making a profit. I am skeptical, however, that local news is going to save the day. Why? Because people are not as interested as they say they are in local news. My local daily paper publishes a weekly section targeting my suburb. I don't see much news in it, but I do see a lot stories about clubs, schools, kids, and churches, I once had the chance to ask the editor why they went with that rather than hard news about town government, politics, etc. The answer: We print the stories that sell newspapers. The local news market is not a hard news market. It's a feel-good gossip market. When a newspaper shrinks and fires newsroom staff, news production in that market drops and is not replaced by online sources. We are all more ignorant as the result, and it's an ignorance that's spreading. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Well, that's your experience. Around here we had a small TV channel create a local news program that talked exclusively about the government, and politics. One day it did go to a public hospital, and interview the governor (we don't have a mayor here) asking why it is so bad, the other it was asking the transportation people when a hole in a street would be fixed... That kind of thing.In the end, they made so well that all the other news had to adapt. Some channels even stopped doing news because they could Pay for what? (Score:2) When the quality of newspapers has been going down, and the shear quantity of news is going up, I fail to see how newspapers are going to be able to compete. Compare a guy who is willing to post news to his blog and get the generated ad-revenue to a newspaper, who has a reporter, editor and all the other associated overhead of a newspaper I would say no contest.If newspapers did good reporting, they may have a shot, but right now I don't see that happening. Re: Furthermore, I'm sick and tired of subscribing to things. Sure, maybe it's only $2 a month for your favorite local news. And it's $5 a month for your favorite game. Netflix is $8 per month. Flikr is $2 per month. Hulu Plus is $8 per month, but soon they want to require that you have a cable TV subscription, so that will be another $50 per month or whatever.This shit really adds up! If I'm paying all this money, I sure as SHIT better not see one god damn commercial or product interruption. Oh wait, they alre Re: Just stop paying for a few months. See if you miss it. Go out more or read more books (yes they cost $ but not a subscription) or play board games or??? ummmm (Score:3) by Have Brain Will Rent (1031664) on Friday May 25, @05:56PM (#40114439) Shouldn't that be "Free and Accurate News Unsustainable"? Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Work Takes Time & Money: News At 11 (Score:2) This just in: having someone collect facts, check them, and then present them takes time and money. Free news was never sustainable, it's just that until recently it wasn't attainable. News will always have a price, be it paying for your paper or having someone else pay for it by inserting ads. Unfortunately advertisers are discovering that online advertising doesn't work, so we'll probably have to settle on the former. Ultimately we're tired of over paying for AP crap (Score:5, Insightful) by Karmashock (2415832) on Friday May 25, @06:00PM (#40114477) The vast majority of "news" is reprocessed news hey pulled off the news wire. If the newspapers do investigative reporting and generate unique content that people actually want to see they won't have a problem. If they have interesting or knowledgable people that contribute or comment on the news they can probably build a business model on that. If all they're doing is reading internet news and then republishing it as their own then that isn't going to work. Is free news really not sustainable? I don't know if even that is true. Companies especially local businesses are DESPERATE for relevant advertising options. Absolutely desperate. Radio, newspapers, park benches... anything. And that has always been a big part of newspaper revenue. When newspapers started they were little more then glorified classified ads. Maybe one or two pages of local news followed by forty pages of classifieds. And yet crag's list exists. Why is that? How could Crag's list have a viable business in cities with major newspapers? Because they offered a better classified ad. And that sort of thing is evident throughout the newspaper business. They're generally bad at the internet. Even their ipad apps are bad. Seen the new york times app? Horrible. When most people bring up a news paper app they want it to be the actual newspaper and not what is basically a webpage configured roughly into the shape of a newspaper. It would be really easy to do this. Hell, you could literally scan the pages vertabim jewelry ads and all into the system. A lot of people would prefer it that way... especially those willing to pay for an online new york times subscription. Anyway, Buffet just bought 63 news papers across the country. So we'll see how he does but I'm predicting epic failure. This is sort of like the time Bill Gates tried to reform American public schools and found so many useless dicks in the system that he figured it would be more practical to cure Malaria in Africa. Have fun with the newspapers Warren... at the very least then you can say it was entertaining. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: True to an extent, but if you have a cute local restaurant you're not going to want to put an ad for it right next to a write-up of a recent child murder. Around here, that kind of advertising goes into the weekly papers, along with the live music listings and the coupons for discount spa treatments. None of that stuff is underwriting the actual news reporting. Re: Well, if your classifies page is crap then someone is going to do it better. A lot of the free papers... totally free papers have no news in them at all. They're just ads and classifies... and sometimes real estate stuff.Every single ad dollar that went into those papers is a dollar the big main paper didn't get. Possibly the big paper could publish both and publish them separately. That way you can fund your unprofitable news charity with real business dollars from the ads.Whatever... the reality is that t Re: Believe it or not, there are laws about that, at least if you plan to sell your product through the U.S. Post. Re: There are newspapers that are 100 percent ads... so I don't see how there is a law about this... if there is there shouldn't be... what right does anyone have to tell the paper how many ads they can put in it? that's just silly. Buffet can go stuff it. (Score:2, Funny) Yeah, free news is unsustainable, right Mr. Buffet!Oh, you must mean don't buy Gold because gold isn't money too eh Mr. Buffet? (As he secretly uses proxies to sell off ETF's to drop the price so he can buy _physical_ gold for low prices.)Or maybe Mr. Buffet really means in translation: We need to put the alternative media out of reach of the internet because too many people are connecting the dots and realize how much of a scam our government is and how the political system really works. (ala Rothchild she Re: You know, it does read like a comic book doesn't it?If it was any other day on a different planet it wold just seem crazy and out of place. Not here on planet Earth though.Sadly, it is all true and because we live in a comic book world of politicans and corruption being so common place, most people just want to be blind about it because they don't want to face everything that is happening. From the collapse of Europe undergoing right now, to NDAA, Patriot Act turning the constitution into just a sheet of Omaha World-Herald (Score:5, Informative) by Enderandrew (866215) <{enderandrew} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday May 25, @06:06PM (#40114575) Homepage Journal Buffet bailed out his local paper first. I worked there. It was "employee" owned in that you could buy stock, but the stock had to stay with the company and usually when the company got rid of people, the executives kept just awarding more and more stock to themselves. They kept paying themselves huge bonuses and talked publicly about record profits, but they maintained the profits by layoffs and pay cuts followed by more layoffs and pay cuts. The publisher/CEO told me that the thought the internet wouldn't affect the newspaper industry at all. It was the same as radio and TV before it. He also bragged about how proud he was of the newspaper's legacy of enacting change in the community via propaganda. When Nebraska was being considered for the first legal casinos outside of reservations, Atlantic City and Vegas, the World-Herald ran front page stories daily about how gambling was evil and would immediately destroy any metropolitan area it was in. So the casinos built right across the river in Iowa. Iowa has been rolling in tax revenue since then, while all the money comes from Omaha. The casinos haven't destroyed our city, but we missed out on all the tax revenue thanks to the paper. I also spoke to a reporter whose assignment was literally to slander someone running for city council in Lincoln, Nebraska as much as possible. He owned a sex toy company, which was against the morals of the paper, and they felt it was their duty to bury the guy. Oddly enough, the paper didn't have morals when it came to abusing employees and laying them off. The company was run exceedingly poorly. Oddly enough, most of the suggestions I made to improve the company were implemented about two years later when the newspaper was somewhat forced to embrace the digital era. Google News has said they'd share revenue with newspapers who feed them stories. And I specifically frequent news sites that have good writers and good view points. You can run a successful newspaper, though the physical product may eventually die out. It is a shame that Buffet is bailing out poorly run companies, because the same corrupt executives who lined their pockets as they laid everyone off just got rewarded for their behavior so it can continue some more. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate It isnt free now (Score:2) You are paying by watching ads. Re: Soon it will be like television where you pay for the service AND are forced [slashdot.org] to watch the commercials! Re: What ads? As a way of thanking me for my existence, I am eligible to enable ad-blocking software. Re: i'm not talking about people that circumvent the system.And some are about impossible to block. ( like the redirect pages ). Free news isn't as good, but that's the point (Score:2) I get all of my news from weekly magazines: The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. They actually report on things that are important (that is, things that I consider important), because I am paying them. Free online news exploits my psychological weaknesses to present me with ad impressions, because the advertisers are paying them. I think what Buffet is saying is that there are (at least) two different markets for news: people who want a distraction, and people who want insight Re: May I ask: What are the main benefits you get out of this quality journalism? Making you a better citizen/voter? Making you a better conversationalist? Making you a more moral person? Making you better understand the world so you can make better decisions (purchases and other life choices)? Making it possible to comment and impress your views on the public debate? And what use do you make of the ads in these quality publications? I'm not paying for you to deliver me ads (Score:2) You want subscription money? You're gonna deliver a product free of ads. Re: That's not going to happen with most newspapers and magazines. People won't pay extra for an ad-free experience when it's easy to ignore or block the ads. It may be another matter if unblockable animated ads start getting placed around content in publications such as tablet apps. Free or Ad Supported? (Score:2) Free news is not sustainable?Somebody better tell CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox and CNN soon. They and others have only been doing that for 90 years or so. I wonder how they pay the bills??Or perhaps Mr. Buffet is not in the right business. In other news.... (Score:2) "Warren Buffet proof that rick people are not smart", says Lumpy.Honestly, the old fart has no clue at all. there has been free news for thousands of years. I think the man needs to get a clue as to how the world works and step outside his ivory tower and see how things have been done for the past 200 years.free news has been king for over 50 years now. I dont pay for my TV news. Re: TV news can more accurately be described as 'infotainment' for the masses; worth-while stories are glossed over, discourse limited to 30 second sound bites, certain important topics not covered at all, human interest stories (puke). Yeah, you don't pay for TV "news". What Buffet's doing is signaling that market that pay walls are OK. Here's what I think is happening: The occupy movement has actually been quite effective at one thing and that's bringing wealth inequality into national discourse, much to In other news.... (Score:4, Insightful) by JustNiz (692889) on Friday May 25, @08:25PM (#40116107) Free News Unsustainable, Says Warren Buffett Billionaires Unsustainable, says Free News... Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate They All Started Out Free (Score:2) Almost without exception, newspapers started out being free and entirely ad-supported. Several small papers in my area still are. Of course, many newspapers moved on to a pay-per-issue model, while still containing all the advertising, if not more. That does not mean it is necessary. Clearly it is not, as the counterexamples demonstrate. It merely means they are greedy. News is a lucrative business. I see absolutely no reason why news cannot continue to be ad-supported. I stopped reading the New York Ti Re: I should have added: I don't think the recent failures have much to do with ad-supported news being non-viable, at all. I think it has had a lot more to do with poor implementations than anything else. Free news has sustained TV stations (Score:3) by Skapare (16644) on Friday May 25, @09:12PM (#40116511) Homepage TV news broadcasts work on the free news model, already, and it works. Ask CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Ask your local TV stations if they will be an alternative news source to the paywalled locked local newspapers when Buffet comes buying. Reply to ThisShareFlag as Inappropriate Free news unsustainable.. sure..but 63 papers also (Score:2) Face it, we need at most less than 10 english language papers.There is no need to have 63 copies of the same AP articles and random articles about someone 1,000 miles away getting robbed or murdered.Plus, the news is so CLEARLY propaganda these days, that the people pushing the propaganda better pay for it, or why bother consuming it.There is a huge glut of news (and every other form of entertainment.) It must fall in price.It can do so now because instead of selling to 100,000 readers, it's selling to 1,0 Whining (Score:2) Is this the beginning of the end of 'free content' for local news?No, it's the equivalent of the whining you see from the other old corporate clowns whenever a technological paradigm shift happens. It's akin to the *AA and their histrionics about home video back in the 1980s and filesharing today. Rest of the deal (Score:2) This many comments and no one mentions the rest of the deal? He bought the papers for about $140M. He also loaned the company he bought them from $400M at 10% annual interest. And Warren doesn't make loans like that unless the terms protect him in the event that the borrower goes bankrupt. So if the papers he bought just break even, he's still making a decent return on the overall investment. policing the 1% (Score:2) The One Percent [youtube.com]47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business. It is (Score:2) If you can fold a device, such as a pad or an e-reader, around it. Without a physical access barrier (which obviously has to be attractive in other ways) - forget it. What's wrong with Warren Buffett? (Score:5, Informative) by PCM2 (4486) on Friday May 25, @05:51PM (#40114379) Homepage What's wrong with Warren Buffett? He's made a lot of money for himself, true, but he's made a lot of money for other people besides. And as for his own wealth, he's in the process of donating it all to charity, to the tune of billions going toward important causes that governments are too broke or shortsighted to fund. He was instrumental in convincing Bill Gates to do the same. If you're going to demonize some successful, wealthy American, I can think of a lot of better targets. Reply to ThisParentShareFlag as Inappropriate Re: Or, in the US, cannot be government funded. There is supposed to be a limit to what the federal government does, although it rarely applies those limits to itself anymore. I.e., neither broke nor shortsighted. I like Warren. And his song about Margueritaville. He's just wasting away ... Re: And "Margaritaville" was a decent song if you like country music. Oh, wait... Re: ... and he did it all from singing about going on a bender and discovering that the salt shaker is missing. Re: When rich people give away excess money to charities, that does not absolve them of guilt for the actions that made them wealthy in the first place. Just because Bill Gates gives away a bunch of money, that doesn't excuse he got that money using illegal monopoly tactics [wikipedia.org]. You can't get credit for giving away money that you stole from taxpayers in the first place.In recent years in particular, Buffett's wealth has been acquired using insider information from his cronies in the White House, actions that woul Re: Buffett was always interested in companies where he had inside information of some form, especially things that allowed him to push toward a "control situation [gurufocus.com]" to improve the value of the stock once he owned enough of it. One of the major investments that built up his early trading cash pile [gurufocus.com] was in GEICO. That came from personally interviewing someone at the company, rather than using the publicly available information about it.If that happened today, it would have insider trading questions all around it Re: News is, by definition, anything new or recent. Regardless of how frequently it happens or has happened in the past. There is no strict mandate that news be interesting. Re: That's an easy position to take and it's one that's probably held by many people. But it's not the ideological stand some like to make it out to be. It's just a reaction to the current reality. At the moment you can opt for a free alternative to the news you're not willing to pay for. So your lack of willingness to pay doesn't have much negative impact on you. If those free alternatives end up being scaled back significantly to the point where they don't meet your needs, then your decision over whether to p Re: He knows that, but if he doesn't make it sound like he thinks he can make money from the actual sale of news (rather than from getting people to support whatever government policy one of his other companies will make a profit off of) people will catch on and it will stop working. Re: Craigslist is actually a really big part of the decline of local papers. Classifieds were a pretty big chunk of revenue. I think people forgot all about that. Re: Quite right. But given the small fraction of readers who actually see a particular ad in a freely-distributed publication, the smaller number who are interested in it, and the even smaller number who are influenced by it, it's understandable why many advertisers are migrating to the better ROI platforms of search engine ads and their own websites, squeezing the money available for editorial, which is our only source of purchase information that has at least has some chance of being free from spin. Re: Unlike newsprint, digital publications have index pages with many headlines (sometimes with short summaries) that are separate from full articles. I find these much quicker to scan than a layout of complete articles, particularly when articles in a printed paper are surrounded with ads that can't be automatically removed like they can on webpages. The problem is that I'm usually only interested in one article in a hundred, which makes it hard to justify a subscription over an a la carte model.